The Origins of Text-Speak, from 1828?

A new exhibit at the British Library on the evolution of English will feature some linguistic play that presages the age of "text-speak." As reported by The Guardian, the exhibit will display a comic poem printed in 1867 with lines like "I wrote 2 U B 4" ("I wrote to you before"). I've investigated this proto-text-speak and have found similar versified examples going all the way back to 1828. [Update: And see the note below for one from 1813!]

The poem in the British Library exhibit is culled from Charles C. Bombaugh's Gleanings From the Harvest-Fields of Literature — you can read it here. (In my puzzling youth, I treasured Bombaugh's Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature, reprinted by Dover and edited by Martin Gardner.) Bombaugh didn't write the poem himself, however. Entitled "An Essay to Miss Catharine Jay," it had been floating around in that exact form at least since 1847 in American publications (as here). An earlier version, entitled "To Miss Catherine Jay of Utica," dates back to 1832, as noted by Allen Walker Read in his 1963 article in American Speech, "The First Stage in the History of 'O.K.'"

That 1963 article was one of a series in which Read proved conclusively that OK had emerged out of a kind of "abbreviation play" that was popular in the U.S. in the 1830s — OK originally stood for "all correct" intentionally misspelled as "oll korrect." (Allan A. Metcalf builds on Read's pioneering work in the soon-to-be-published OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word.)

Even before KTJ of UTK (Katie Jay of Utica, or Uticay) came on the scene in the United States, England had LNG of Q (Ellen Gee of Kew) and MLE K of UL (Emily Kay of Ewell), who starred in two tragicomic verses published in 1828 in the London-based New Monthly Magazine. You can read "Dirge, to the Memory of Miss Ellen Gee of Kew" here, and "Elegy to the Memory of Miss Emily Kay (Cousin to Miss Ellen Gee of Kew)" here. These verses (the second one in particular) traveled far and wide, appearing in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. They very well may have played a role in the American fad for silly abbreviations that gave rise to OK. And that same creative impulse, as David Crystal argues cogently in Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, shaped text-speak a century and a half later.

Here is "Elegy to the Memory of Miss Emily Kay," with my decrypted and annotated rendering in the right-hand column:

1Exuviae, according to the Visual Thesaurus, means "cast-off skins or coverings of various organisms during ecdysis." (And ecdysis, as we learned in the National Spelling Bee, is the shedding of skin.) This is obviously a more figurative use of the word.

2 The "N" is larger on the page, and the rhyme with discharge is the clue that this requires the rebus-like reading of "N large" = enlarge.

4Toupee, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, once meant "a curl or artificial lock of hair on the top of the head" that was "worn by both sexes." The OED also says it used to be pronounced like "2-P."

5 Along with its use as a verb, elate was also once an adjective meaning "high-spirited."

6Immure means "lock up or confine, in or as in a jail." If you have a "non-rhotic" or "r-dropping" accent, then it's possible to read "MU" as immure. A later version from 1830 printed by Horace Smith changed "MU" to "MUR," which works for rhotic speakers too.

7 Another rebus-like bit of wordplay, this time involving punctuation: the colon is read as "coal on."

8 "I 10" for heighten works best in dialects that often drop initial h's (a typical "Cockney" feature). Horace Smith revised this one too, changing it to a rebus-like "high ten" in his 1830 version.

[But wait! Could this verse style have been an American invention after all? On the American Dialect Society mailing list, Joel S. Berson provides an example that uses many of the same types of abbreviation play, published in U.S. newspapers in 1813 — a full fifteen years before Miss LNG and Miss MLE K. The hunt continues...]

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Comments from our users:

Good hunting, and thanks for deciphering! Some of the abbreviations, 'BR BDU' for example, would have left me baffled. These poems are very much a visual joke: if they were recited aloud, their unusual quality would go unnoticed.

I like 'L E G on the Death of L X and R N S, Squire of the Coun T of S X', which begins at the bottom of
this page, but it's not a contender for oldest text-speak poem.

Yes, Ben, the translation helped for that BR BDU bit! I managed the rest just fine. I guess it's the unexpected words. These used to be great puzzle items in the 70s, before texting! Then it was just a challenge to get students to think outside the usual.